README

How to setup Honeycomb in a Rails application

This example is based on the Quick start guide to setup the OpenTelemetry collector.

To install Rails follow the Getting Started with Rails Guide.

The included application was generated using

bin/rails generate scaffold Post name:string title:string content:text

Get an API key from Honeycomb

Follow the Honeycomb documentation.

You should use an ingest key as these have less privileges than configuration keys. In our case, our ingest key starts with "hca" and has 64 characters.

export YOUR_HC_API_KEY="your-secret-key-here"

Start collector via docker

export YOUR_HC_API_KEY="your-secret-key-here"
docker run \
  --rm \
  --name collector-159pm  \
  -e YOUR_HC_API_KEY=$YOUR_HC_API_KEY \
  -v ./opentelemetry-collector.yaml:/opentelemetry-collector.yaml \
  -p 127.0.0.1:4317:4317 \
  -p 127.0.0.1:4318:4318 \
  -p 127.0.0.1:55679:55679 \
  otel/opentelemetry-collector:0.99.0 \
  --config=/opentelemetry-collector.yaml
# leave this command running, it'll display the log

Send test telemetry data

telemetrygen is a utility written in go that simulates a client generating OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs (documentation).

~/go/bin/telemetrygen traces --otlp-http  --otlp-insecure --otlp-endpoint "localhost:4318" --traces 10

You should see things like this in the output for the opentelemetry-collector container running in docker.

Span #19
    Trace ID       : eaf7266466d0903c981518b63cb5c68b
    Parent ID      : 
    ID             : ef773ed9597deb32

Also, the counters displayed on http://localhost:55679/debug/tracez should increase as you generate more traces with the telemetrygen command.

The dashboard on https://ui.honeycomb.io should display data for the telemetrygen dataset.

Start Rails application

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:4318"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL="http/protobuf"
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="testing-app"
bin/rails server

Point a browser to http://localhost:3000/posts and do some operations on post: show/create/edit/destroy. You should see things like this in the output for the opentelemetry-collector container running in docker.

Span #1
    Trace ID       : 99fcc0aa57fb478023b383242082c62c
    Parent ID      : 927dfe074825fbc0
    ID             : a23e03041c974049
    Name           : Post.find_by_sql
    Kind           : Internal

Also, the counters displayed on http://localhost:55679/debug/tracez should increase as you perform more actions.

The dashboard on https://ui.honeycomb.io should display data for the testing-app dataset.